Dwight Garner at the NY Times:
Jack Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, lived hard and died young. She was 44 when she succumbed to complications of liver failure in Albuquerque in 1996. She met her famous father, the author of “On the Road” and the avatar of the Beat generation, only twice.
She was born in 1952, shortly after her parents, Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty, separated. At the time, her father was penniless and all but unknown. The publication of “On the Road” was still five years off. He didn’t feel ready to have a child. He attempted to deny paternity and never publicly acknowledged his daughter before his own death in 1969. Jan lugged a famous last name through her short life, and it was both a blessing and a curse. Father and daughter looked alike, and there was a continuity of soul between them. She inherited Jack’s imperative toward motion, and she too became a writer, publishing three semi-autobiographical novels: “Baby Driver” (1981), “Train Song” (1988) and the unfinished “Parrot Fever” (2005), published posthumously. Each has long been out of print.
That changes now with the reissue of “Baby Driver,” the most sharply realized of her books.
more here.
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